Algorithms Team

Weaving data science pervasively throughout our business

"There's an algorithm for that!" (Take the tour to learn more.)

From the algorithms blog

A New Era of Creativity: Expert-in-the-loop Generative AI at Stitch Fix

Tianlin Duan on March 06, 2023
2022 Intern Projects

Algorithms Internship on January 03, 2023
Leveraging the Plain Old Python Function

Elijah ben Izzy on December 14, 2022

Our Pulse

A row of data analysts working on laptops

Data artistry: We love what we do: Quantify art and fashion to build recommendation algorithms to make our clients look their best.
Technological greenfield: We’ve built just a fraction of the tools and solutions that we need. The combination of data and fashion puts us in a unique place where we can forge the next generation of tools and methods.
Focus on what matters: Our data is information-rich and resides in robust and easy to access platforms. This allows us to focus on the models, methods, and code to achieve our objectives.

Our Teams

A casual discussion between Stitch Fix employees

Client Algorithms: Understand our clients, predict their demands, and optimize operations.
Styling Algorithms: Meet the recommendation engineers: Where the art and fashion is quantified and shipped.
Merch Algorithms: Mastering the science of clothing, inventory, and complex logistics.
Data Platform: Build robust and powerful technologies to store, access, and compute data.

Academic Collaborations

Social Algorithms Labs @ Stanford (SOAL): The Algorithms team works closely with SOAL where a group of interdisciplinary researchers focus on social and economic science and computational science and algorithms.

Stanford Industry Affiliates: We are a member of the Industrial Affiliates Program of the Statistics Department at Stanford, helping us stay abreast of the latest statistical techniques and build relationships with statistical researchers.

algorithms Team

John Clevenger — John Clevenger
Client Algorithms

John is a data scientist with a passion for inference under uncertainty. He prefers his inferences to be logically coherent but generally uses null hypothesis significance testing anyway. He's a big fan of being outside with his wife, hazy ipas, and the Dodgers. Past John was a cognitive scientist who used to be a philosopher.

Patrick Foley — Patrick Foley
Styling Algorithms

Patrick enjoys math and maps, and he loves Arizona (U of A) college basketball. He is language agnostic, and prefers trying the simplest things first. AZ -> CA -> PA -> CA.

Kurt Bollacker — Kurt Bollacker
Data Platform

Kurt has been a scientist, a software engineer, a digital archivist, and random problem solver. He also engages in cake baking, circus aerial, and biking around the city. He enjoys problems that have no obvious solution. You can always bribe him with excellent food, especially desserts.

Cian Menzel-Jones — Cian Menzel-Jones
Merch Algorithms

Cian loves developing original ideas based on insights from data whether it's in geophysics, molecular spectroscopy or women's fashion. Outside of the office he'll probably be playing a sport. Hails from Vancouver, BC.

Ian Horn — Ian Horn
Styling Algorithms

Ian is eternally curious how everything works, so he loves data. Professionally, he thinks static typing and functional languages are pretty cool. In his native habitat of the Bay Area, you can frequently find him cooking, reading, or swimming.

Jeff Magnusson — Jeff Magnusson
Data Platform

Jeff likes Python, coffee, and combining the two to build data infrastructure that’s incredibly easy and fun to use. Hails from Texas.

Tara Lydiard-Martin — Tara Lydiard-Martin
Client Algorithms

Tara loves using data and visualizations to make complex systems feel intuitive. In her free time she enjoys ultimate frisbee, dancing, and the Brazilian martial art of capoeira. Hails from Seattle.

Oz Raza — Oz Raza
Data Platform

Oz enjoys trying to distill complex interactions into their most basic parts using machine learning. In his free time he can be found reading, climbing, playing at the FLGS, and exploring San Francisco through it's restaurants and coffee shops. Most recently hails from Canada.

Kevin Zielnicki — Kevin Zielnicki
Styling Algorithms

Kevin is particularly interested in the impact algorithms can have when used as an amplifier for human creativity. After a past life as a quantum mechanic, he is happy to work with data that can be observed without changing its value.

Aaron Bradley — Aaron Bradley
Data Platform

Aaron likes big ideas and transforming today's impossible into tomorrow's commonplace. He joins us from northern Colorado and enjoys good wine, tasty coffee, and building battle-ready robots.

Derek Bennett — Derek Bennett
Data Platform

Derek’s passion is creating applications that offer new insights and support decision making. He is equally comfortable playing with new technologies or tinkering with antiquated photography equipment. When not developing with Scala, Java or Python, Derek enjoys hiking and outdoor activities along with travel, art, and wine tasting. Care and feeding can be accomplished with a good cup of coffee, an IPA, or a long lunch.

Chris Rinaldi — Chris Rinaldi
Merch Algorithms

In a previous life, Chris worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the US Army to create predictive models and perform threat analyses. Now, he uses data to help design and analyze clothing.

Thomas Millar — Thomas Millar
Data Platform

Despite graduating and becoming a full-time platform engineer here at Stitch Fix, he will forever be seen as our intern. He may spend his days wrestling distributed systems into submission and his nights cooking, but he’s only really good for grabbing the rest of the team coffee. Thanks Thomas!

Jeff Schecter — Jeff Schecter
Styling Algorithms

Jeff appreciates clever loss functions, latent spaces with interesting properties, and generative models for funky high-dimensional distributions. He makes wheel-thrown ceramics and comes from North Carolina.

Dan Tasse — Dan Tasse
Merch Algorithms

Dan grew up writing code, then discovered that the most fun part of that was learning new things from data. You might find him traveling to kind of inconvenient places. Also: bikes, coffee, amaro, Talking Heads, word games, Pittsburgh.

Xiyu Peng — Xiyu Peng
Client Algorithms

Three important questions Xiyu thinks about every single day are: where to eat (cannot live without food), what clothes to wear (we care about style) and how to do data science (data is treasure!). Besides these, she also likes dancing, hiking and spicy food.

Shelly Jang — Shelly Jang
Client Algorithms

Shelly enjoys using data to build compelling narratives, mining self-logs for quantified self, and lifting heavy things. Hails from Seoul, and calls Seattle second home.

Danielle Quinn — Danielle Quinn
Client Algorithms

Dan lives her life by the three Rs — running, reading, and ‘rithmatic. She loves the thrill of building and analyzing data driven models to gain insights about the real world. When not at work, you’ll probably find her out for a run, curled up with a good book, or spending time with her friends and family. Hails from Philly (yes, an Eagles fan, but not the battery-throwing kind).

Chris Moradi — Chris Moradi
Styling Algorithms

Chris likes to learn new things and share what he knows with others. He believes his jokes are like fine wine: they get better with age and benefit from being explained in great detail. In his free time, he writes music and likes to spend time with his teacher/comedian wife and high-fiving cat, Agent Cooper.

Mark Dijkstra — Mark Dijkstra
Global Optimization

Mark loves simplicity in models, and using data to understand complex phenomena. Hails from the Netherlands, though a career in astronomy led him all over the world with his family for many years. It seems only fitting he now works on global optimization. Mark also likes the ocean, its inhabitants, SUP, and lifeboats.

Eddie Landesberg — Eddie Landesberg
Client Algorithms

Eddie enjoys using fully bayesian inference to inform business decisions that incorporate information and uncertainty from a variety of sources. In his leisure time, he enjoys hiking / backpacking, exploring the west coast and drinking (often Belgian) beer. In his home life, he reads textbooks and loads his dishwasher with extreme precision. Hailing from the suburbs of NYC, he's still in awe of the natural beauty of the west.

Xinyu Tian — Xinyu Tian
Client Algorithms

Xinyu appreciates logics. Exploring logics from data is the most thrilling thing for her. She likes to be challenged and hates living a boring life.

Natalia Gardiol — Natalia Gardiol
Styling Algorithms

Natalia loves brains and figuring out how they make decisions under uncertainty. She holds a PhD in computer science from MIT, and is fond of riding, racing, breaking, fixing, and falling off of all kinds of bicycles. On a constant lookout for pithy epitaphs, Natalia believes a good bias is hard to find.

Meaghan Paulosky — Meaghan Paulosky
Data Engineering

Meaghan was first bitten by the data bug when she tried analyzing the impact of sleep deprivation on college test scores in lieu of submitting a term paper. Her professor still made her write the paper, but she decided to continue building analyses that could make life a little easier. Other interests include hiking, road trips, and trying out new hobbies - currently it’s boxing. Hails from Philadelphia, but she will not chant EAGLES. Go Big Blue!

Diane Ivy — Diane Ivy
Merch Algorithms

Diane loves finding answers from data. While originally from South Carolina, she loves the Bay Area and is happy to have escaped New England winters. Interests include running, yoga, Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee, and her dog (Oscar).

Rachel Insoft — Rachel Insoft
Client Algorithms

Rachel loves using machine learning and data to find proof behind business intuition. Beyond the office you can find her doing a crossword puzzle, instagram stalking Corgis, intensively researching new restaurants, and playing along with Jeopardy. She is happiest near the ocean or in a wine & cheese shop. Originally hailing from Boston, Rachel is the proud owner of a `#FreeBrady` shirt.

Diyang Tang — Diyang Tang
Merch Algorithms

Diyang loves using data to figure things out. Similarly, she likes puzzlehunts, orienteering, knitting, and fiction book clubs.

Balaji Rengarajan — Balaji Rengarajan
Client Algorithms

Balaji hails from India and makes his way to Stitchfix via Austin and Madrid. He's an engineer by training, and was building wireless network that could think for themselves before getting hooked by data. An aficianado of Occam's razor, he enjoys building intuitive models for complex problems and translating math to elegant data structures and robust, maintainable code. When not data sciencing, he loves traveling, freestyle cooking, or being on a trail with or without his bike.

Daniel Marthaler — Daniel Marthaler
Merch Algorithms

Daniel Marthaler is an applied mathematician on the Merch Algorithms team trying to figure out how to make computers learn to learn. He surrounds himself with labradoodles, good conversation and people who like building legos.

Mithila Joshi — Mithila Joshi
Data Platform

Mithila loves building data products that power decision making and is super excited to be working in the realm of Fashion and Technology (A dream job she never thought was possible!) Outside of work, she enjoys a cup of tea (chaivinist alert!), a good mystery novel, traveling, dancing (Bollywood, [Ball/Bath]room) and eating all things spicy though she is mostly found wolfing down desserts.

Reza Sohrabi — Reza Sohrabi
Styling Algorithms

Reza loves working at Stitch Fix because it is at the forefront of applying machine learning to real-world problems. He is passionate about AI, especially NLP. He loves cooking, taking long walks, listening to post-rock music, and playing chess and poker.

Ivan Teo — Ivan Teo
Client Algorithms

Ivan used to simulate biomolecular systems in a past life. He now spends much of his time tackling more macroscopic problems using statistics, machine learning, and sometimes pure guesswork. Outside of work, he enjoys wine, whisky, rockclimbing, hiking, playing the piano, and aiki-jujutsu.

Molly Davies — Molly Davies
Styling Algorithms

Molly loves statistics, especially tricky causal inference problems with goopy dependent data. She also loves music: past Molly played a lot of piano, present Molly is an enthusiastic violin student. She needs regular doses of outside-time to feel whole and has had some of her best ideas while squishing aphids in her garden.

Han Lai — Han Lai
Merch Algorithms

Han comes from the background of semiconductor physics using math to describe physical phenomenon. Now he spends his time using math to describe human behaviors. Outside of work, he enjoys football, cooking, craft beer and hiking.

Robert Harris — Robert Harris
Data Platform

Robert enjoys making the computers do the hard bits, so we can get on to the fun stuff. He has previously worked at NASA, Twitter and Lyft. He has a passion for visualization, and loves learning about people and systems. He grew up in the snowy north east, but still brings a jacket with him as he hikes around San Francisco.

Jared Vasquez — Jared Vasquez
Merch Algorithms

Jared has a background in experimental particle physics, where he led teams within the ATLAS collaboration performing precision measurements of the Higgs boson. Since leaving academia, Jared has worked as a data scientist creating production models for use cases in finance, aviation, and renewable energy. He enjoys music, bad movies (some good ones), and spending time with his dog.

Rong Yuan — Rong Yuan
Merch Algorithms

Chris Said — Chris Said
Styling Algorithms

Chris is a data scientist coming from a previous career in neuroscience. At work, Chris enjoys working on impactful projects. Outside work, he enjoys writing and learning about stats, econ, and science.

Damien Martin — Damien Martin
Inventory Algorithms

Damien has a background in teaching and mentoring technical fields. He started teaching physics and math at liberal arts colleges, then taught at a data science bootcamp to help people change their careers. Now he works as a data scientist, while exploring the worlds of books, hikes, and photography.

Jim Kubicek — Jim Kubicek
Data Engineering

Jim joins us from Collective Health where he lead the Data Engineering team. Previously he has worked at Twitter, Smule and Capital One. He has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, but likes to talk about his research more than he likes to actually perform his research. In his spare time he enjoys backpacking, snowboarding and teaching his little girls how to eat spicy food.

Susan Chin — Susan Chin
Data Engineering

Susan loves unearthing interesting patterns behind data and empowering people to make decisions based on numbers. She has a sweet tooth and is obsessed with boba. Born in Burma, but loves to call San Francisco her home and can be found at various dog parks with her dog, Benji, on the weekends.

Katherine Schinkel — Katherine Schinkel
Merch Algorithms

Katherine is a Bay Area transplant from the East Coast with diverse industry experience ranging from dating apps to bra sizing and from startups to larger companies. When not optimizing everything, Katherine enjoys sharing her new hobby of mixology with friends and family.

Tianlin Duan — Tianlin Duan
Client Algorithms

Tianlin is a Bayesian experimenter constantly updating her prior beliefs in light of new data about herself, today’s consumers, and the world. When she is not solving data problems, Tianlin enjoys going on food adventures, finding out what’s in season at the farmers market, doing yoga, listening to bossa nova, and having great conversations over Guava Kombucha.

Jonathan Landy — Jonathan Landy
Global Optimization

Jonathan lives in Oakland. He is a student of 19th century mathematics.

Brent Follin — Brent Follin
Inventory Forecasting

Brent ranks style guides, containers, and API contracts somewhere in the top 10 of mankind's inventions. A data scientist by training, outlook, and title, he also often finds himself diving into infrastructure, frameworks, and system architecture to get data insights delivered in the best, most scalable way. An Appalachian transplant, Brent has a mountain soul, and spends his free time finding new quiet places in and around the Bay.

Shubhi Jain — Shubhi Jain
Styling Recommendations

Shubhi is a Bay Area native and enjoys solving all types of interesting problems, whether they're related to sports or finance. When he's not looking at a computer screen, he loves to play soccer, hike with his dog, and pretend he was sorted into Slytherin House.

Ramandeep Singh — Ramandeep Singh
Data Platform

Ramandeep has a background in distributed systems, java virtual machine, concurrent programming and machine learning. He likes to blog, read sci-fi and non fiction novels, and go on long drives.

Aaron Rosenbaum — Aaron Rosenbaum
Client Algorithms

Aaron is a data scientist with a background in financial policy. He’s from New Jersey but doesn’t miss the east coast weather. He enjoys machine learning and experiments of all kinds, including with his pressure cooker.

Stefan Müller — Stefan Müller
Client Algorithms

Stefan is a Math professor turned data scientist who loves solving open-ended problems. He enjoys traveling the world (and occasionally stays somewhere for a few years), spending time outdoors / exercising, and being a dad to two boys. Sometimes plays or coaches football, and refuses to refer to it as soccer. Also a coffee snob and beer/wine enthusiast. Hails from Germany.

Matt Burgess — Matt Burgess
Merch Algorithms

Matt is a computer scientist with a broad range of interests and a preference for application but an appreciation for theory. He loves growing flowers in his garden and riding his bike around the bay area.

Achhunna Mali — Achhunna Mali
Data Platform

Achhunna is an analyst-turned-UI engineer who is fascinated with art of storytelling with data visualization. He loves coffee and writing scripts to automate annoying/repetitive tasks that saves a few seconds, even if they take a lot longer to write. He grew up in Nepal but calls San Francisco home and appreciates proximity to surfing spots, where he can be found catching waves on sunny days.

Avinash Mandakulathur Kumar — Avinash Mandakulathur Kumar
Data Platform

Avinash is an engineer who loves to work on distributed systems related to data processing. Having grown up in southern India and now at SF, he loves travelling, a casual run, some hot tea and trying his best to meditate and be mindful.

Nathan Selikoff — Nathan Selikoff
Data Platform

Nathan has been programming and making art since he was a little kid, sitting at a Commodore 64 staring at that blinking cursor - the pulse of possibility. He loves bringing interactive experiences to life, playing music with friends, gardening, and fermenting all the things.

Natalia Bilenko — Natalia Bilenko
Data Platform

Natalia likes finding stories in data, art in science, and churros in hand.

John Khawam — John Khawam
Merch Algorithms

John loves using inventory as efficiently as possible.

Tiffany Cheng — Tiffany Cheng
Merch Algorithms

Tiffany enjoys grappling with ambiguous problems and embarking upon the nonlinear adventures that they often yield. Her background is in statistics and public health. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking, running, improving her turnout for ballet, and catching performing arts shows around the Bay.

Jonah Liebert — Jonah Liebert
Data Platform

Jonah loves working with collaborative folks building practical, useful systems and software. He enjoys time with his family most of all. Otherwise, he can often be found admiring and listening to records - mostly Metal, Rock & Jazz.

Philip Starhill — Philip Starhill
Client Algorithms

Philip has spent most of his life in California and most of his career working on mathematical problems. He enjoys learning about the history of philosophy, especially epistemology, and being in the company of people whose talents exceed his own.

Juno the Goat — Juno the Goat
Chief Goat Officer

Simply the Greatest 🐐 Of All Times

Merve Kovan — Merve Kovan
Global Optimization

Merve enjoys understanding the big picture and filling in the puzzle pieces with data. Puzzles are in her life outside of work, as well as reading, dancing and making things (via knitting, cooking and random arts and crafts).

Victoria Liu — Victoria Liu
Merch Algorithms

Vicky is a data enthusiast, fashion photographer, and traveler. She enjoys uncovering data insights and solving problems using machine learning and optimization. Beijing -> Kansas City -> Boston -> DC -> Seattle.

Vasanth Kalingeri — Vasanth Kalingeri
Merch Algorithms

Vasanth enjoys building models for diverse applications and engineering systems. Outside of work, he likes to spend time swimming or doing yoga.

Martin Amps — Martin Amps
Austin

Martin is a software engineer that enjoys reverse-engineering, building innovative products and finding practical solutions to business problems. Though originally from the UK, he has spent almost a decade living in, and exploring the USA. In his free time he loves to hike, skydive, travel and the consumpion of good wine.

Ujjwal Sarin — Ujjwal Sarin
San Francisco

Ujjwal is a software engineer that enjoys building products at the intersection of data, infrastructure, and services. In his spare time he is passionate about cooking, jiu jitsu, and yoga.

Karim Wahba — Karim Wahba
Client Algorithms

Karim enjoys using data to make things better, working from first principles, and working on greenfield problems that involve going from 0 to 1. Effectively a Californian at this point, he grew up on the East Coast and the Middle East. In a past life, Karim was a physicist and continues to be intrigued by how the world works. Outside of the job, he likes competitive sailing, Cuban music, and watching historical documentaries.

Meng Zhao — Meng Zhao
Merch Algorithms

Meng's background is in statistics and survival analysis. She previously worked on pricing and yield management for perishable inventory and is interested in all kinds of optimization problems. She enjoys rock climbing, card games, and traditional drawing, and is constantly yearning to be back in the Canadian Rockies.

Dirk Sierag — Dirk Sierag
Styling Algorithms

Dirk Sierag has a strong background in applying data science and operations research in pricing and revenue management for airlines, hotels, and live events. Dirk loves traveling across the world, to experience all of the rich cultures and extraordinary life and nature on our lovely planet.

Viridiana Lourdes — Viridiana Lourdes
Client Algorithms

Viridiana is a Data Scientist who loves the thrill of uncovering the layers of insights while building models and doing data visualization. She is passionate about learning, from new coding skills and algorithms to the history of human societies. Originally from Mexico, she is always ready for good food.

Carl Morris — Carl Morris
Styling Algorithms

Carl is an operations research data scientist with experience developing optimization, simulation, and machine learning algorithms. Previously, he worked for Amazon and JD.com in areas such as data center capacity planning, last mile delivery, instock planning, and pricing. He received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Georgia Tech. Outside work, he enjoys exploring new places, staying fit, and most of all spending time with his family.

Colin Jemmott — Colin Jemmott
Styling Algorithms

During the day Colin builds recommender systems, but often sneaks off for bike rides. His weekends are filled with gardening, making things from wood and steel, and tinkering in the shop.

Sue Ye — Sue Ye
Styling Algorithms

Sue is a data scientist interested in all kinds of recommendations and NLP algorithms. Besides work, she has the best badminton and cooking skill among the friends who likes playing piano.

Tom Plagge — Tom Plagge
Merch and Ops Algorithms

Tom is a data scientist and recovering astronomer. He enjoys all manner of outdoors activities and is an enthusiastic, if not altogether competent, cook and homebrewer. He lives in the East Bay with his wife and twin girls, his dog, his good cat, and his evil cat.

Tianji Li — Tianji Li
Data Platform

Hacker, dad of two.

Jimmy Charité — Jimmy Charité
Styling Algorithms

Jimmy is a data scientist with experience in sourcing and ranking systems, causal inference, and forecasting. Previously, he worked on Instagram’s Machine Learning Infra and Mental Well-being teams. There he implemented and socialized frameworks for offline evaluation of sourcing and ranking models, worked on frameworks for personalizing sourcing models, and helped drive to market Instagram’s first major teen mental well-being intervention. Outside of work, he enjoys exploring restaurants and the performing arts scene in NYC.

Susrutha Gongalla — Susrutha Gongalla
Fix Recommendations

Susrutha is a data scientist who recently transitioned into machine learning engineering. She is passionate about seeing her work have an impact in the real world. Outside of work, she loves to play with her dog and spend time outdoors!

Anelise Newman — Anelise Newman
Style Discovery

Anelise is excited about building ML-powered systems that people interact with. Previously, she was at MIT and Stanford doing research in computer vision and human-computer interaction. She enjoys sewing and makes most of her own clothes. When she is not coding or working on a new outfit, she is probably cooking, hiking, or gardening.

DilipKumarVarma Jetty — DilipKumarVarma Jetty
Charlotte, NC

Dilip is technology enthusiast, problem solver. Skilled in cloud technologies and cloud native implementations. Outside of the job, he likes reading books, research, watching movies with family and friends.

Jeff Cooper — Jeff Cooper
Merch Algorithms

Jeff is a data leader who loves trying to simplify complicated problems (and then complicate them again). He once marched in the Rose Parade, very badly.

Kriti Bansal — Kriti Bansal
Data Engineering

Kriti loves churning data and solving business problems. She is creative, inquisitive, analytical and a quick learner. Spicy food is an absolute guilty pleasure. Outside of work, she could be found travelling or on her couch, binging on a web series.

Luran He — Luran He
Client Algorithms

Luran loves cooking, chess, reading, and singing, but is only any good at two of them. His background is math but his greatest weakness is simple arithmetic.

Vinod Cheriyan — Vinod Cheriyan
Merch Algorithms

Vinod loves working with teams and models (the beautiful, mathematical kind). He is passionate about building systems that lie in the intersection of OR and ML, data science and software engineering. In his spare time, he loves to read, solve math puzzles, do calligraphy and write short poems.

Come Work with Us!

We’re a diverse team dedicated to building great products, and we’d love your help. Do you want to build amazing products with amazing peers? Join us!